ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

58 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
In quoting the M!les-Ramsden experiments he is so ignorant as
not to see their total irrelevancy to his problem. Their telepathic
experiments related more especially to present mental states of the
agent and percipient. Those in his own problem did not have this
characteristic, no matter how you explain them.
The account of Dr. Hodgson is a total misrepresentation of the
man. He is accredited with a superstitious and credulous belief in
what was said by Mrs. Piper's controls in the case. I talked personally
with Dr. Hodgson about this very case and he had no such
attitude of mind about it. He fully recognizes the damning nature
of the facts and only objected to newspaper exploitation of facts
which a scientific man had the first right to discuss where the
whole record could be given. Any intelligent man who had read
Dr. Hodgson's two Reports would see that he had no such tendencies
as this author represents, and it only makes intelligent people
sceptical about Mr. Philpot's whole case to find so unintelligent an
attack on Dr. Hodgson and other scientific men.
Mr. Philpot wholly mistakes the grounds on which these men
based their advocacy of the spiritistic hypothesis. It may interest
him to know that they, including Dr. Hodgson most emphatically,
would not for one moment have considered the recovery of Dean
Bridgman Conner as evidence for spirits. Mr. Philpot gives his
own ignorance away completely in admitting that the truth of the
facts would have been the best evidence the Society ever obtained.
They would not have so regarded it at all. They would have valued
it as good proof of the supernormal, but not as the best evidence
for the existence of spirits. I was intimate with Dr. Hodgson for
sixteen years and he would scoff at any such assumption. The facts
might be good evidence after the existence of spirits had once
been proved, but they would not be evidence in the first degree.
Their truth would not be beyond the large telepathy which the
author and the public believes without scientific evidence, so that
the spiritistic theory is not especially concerned with them until
it has been proved.
If Mr. Philpot had omitted his animadversions and animosities
against scientific men and had published the detailed records with
a fair-minded discussion of the facts, he might have been of some
service to science. As it is he has only stimulated the contempt of
those owho want to know what all the facts were. The ground on
which these scientific men based their hypothesis of spirits was
the articulate and collective unity of supernormal information related
to the personal identity of the dead. That would stand in
spite of all the fiascos connected with the search for living people.
The existence of supernormal information in such searches, explicable
by telepathy. would not affect the question of spirits in
other cases. All that such fiascos establish is a perplexity in the
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